New Thinking for a New World

It’s still early in 2023, but we already know the word of the year: ChatGPT. The amazing bit of technology generates articulate and nuanced articles in response to short questions. Want a report on the World Cup final written in the style of Shakespeare, or a story about Russian strategy in Henry Kissinger's voice? No problem, ChatGPT can produce it. Want to pass the US medical licensing exam or get good grades in business school at Wharton? No problem, ChatGPT just did both of those.

What could possibly go wrong with underlying technology that can research, write, draw, code, compose music, and possibly even think at least as well as many, if not most, human beings?

Our guests on "New Thinking for a New World” have offered to help us understand not only what's technically called generative artificial intelligence, but to think together about the impact on jobs, on creativity, and innovation, on how we might be living in the not-so-distant future.

Juan Enriquez is an entrepreneur and an expert on the impact of life sciences and brain research on society. Mark Abdollahian is a businessman and academic who works at the intersection of strategy, operations, and analytics.

2023 looks likely to be a year of recession, inflation, social and labor unrest, war, the ravages of climate, food insecurity, rising inequality. One casualty of that mess is likely to be the rule of law; justice seems to take a beating when times are bad. Why is that?

The demand for justice is not only a basic human right, but also a human need. Yet justice systems in many countries, rich and poor, are too cumbersome, too wrapped up in formalities, too layered with complex and even contradictory laws. Is it possible to deliver effective justice at the individual level, to actually make justice systems work for people?

Our guest this week, Sam Muller, believes the answer is an emphatic, “Yes,” especially if it is based on data. As a Dutch legal expert he founded and today leads the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL). He and his colleagues are in the business of building “people-centered justice” that works for everyone.

What do you think?

At least one in nine of the almost eight billion people who live on earth are undernourished. As the 18th century economist Robert Malthus forecast, we seem on a path where the planet can’t produce enough food for the projected 10 billion people who will be alive in 2050. Climate change and wars will only make the global food situation more precarious.

Is large scale famine inevitable?

David Kaplan, a global leader in the new field of cellular agriculture, doesn’t think so. He believes the steaks and fish fillets that he and other scientists are literally growing in their labs can eventually feed a hungry world. What do you think?

This episode was originally published on August 18, 2022

We live in a complicated, conflicted world. Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine. US and European efforts to punish Russian aggression in ways that challenge the basic rules of financial and commercial globalization. China's growing geopolitical and military assertiveness, highlighted by increasing threats to repatriate Taiwan. Even Japan and Germany, long advocates of soft power, have announced they will re-arm in the face of rising global threats.

What about India? Today it's the world's sixth largest economy and famously, the world's largest democracy. But it aims higher. Prime Minister Modi recently declared that the country must accelerate its growth and development; by 2050 only China and the US are likely to have larger economies.

However, rapid economic growth might be the easy part compared to figuring out how to live with an expansionist, aggressive China. When Chinese leaders intone their mantra of “Asia for the Asians” they don’t seem to be offering co-leadership to Delhi or anyone else.

Indeed, India shares a border of more than 2000 miles with China and has fought the Chinese repeatedly, as recently as 2020. It seems inevitable that India and China will butt heads again—perhaps repeatedly—as both countries become stronger. And to add a twist, Russia, China's declared best friend forever is India's largest arms supplier.

C Raja Mohan, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Delhi, has a deep understanding of India’s foreign policy challenges. Listen as he explains how India can cope with a dangerous world and a dangerous neighbor.

This episode was originally published on September 08, 2022.

What do you think?

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine ebbs and flows, the whole world is watching—and wondering. What does Putin want? How far will he go in his efforts to subjugate Ukraine? Does he have limits? Has he, as Angela Merkel said a few years ago, lost touch with reality? If so, then what?

By the time historians can answer those questions, it will be too late, certainly for thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, and conceivably for the rest of us. Meanwhile, one of the best places to find answers might be in a recently published biography, simply entitled PUTIN by Philip Short.

Short is a British journalist with a long career as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, Beijing and Washington for the BBC, The Economist and The Times of London. He is also an accomplished author, having written biographies of Mao, Pol Pot and Francois Mitterand.

Short recently joined the New Thinking for a New World podcast to discuss how Putin looks at the world, what turned him away from a partnership with the West, and the risk that his war could go nuclear.

What do you think?

This episode was originally published on October 06, 2022.

As recently as September 2021, outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel described economic relations between Europe and China as "win-win.” Within nine months, the EU's de facto Foreign Minister Josep Borrell described EU-China relations as "a dialogue of the deaf."

Geopolitics rarely moves at that speed. Even if by then Merkel was trying to gild her legacy and Borrell often says the wrong thing at the wrong time, there is no doubt that the prevailing view of China in many European capitals has suddenly flipped from growing cooperation to feared confrontation.

What happened? Did President Xi’s hardening approaches—from wolf warrior diplomacy to his “No Limits” commitment to Russia to lecturing Western leaders—shock European leaders? Did American pressure on 5G, Huawei and microchips force a strategic rethink? Can Europe actually afford to confront China?

Andrew Small has answers. A deeply experienced policy analyst, Small is a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and recently published, "No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West." That book and this conversation explain how and why he thinks that the Chinese challenge is dramatically and dangerously changing.

What do you think?

For many, the holiday season is a time of giving, when people think a bit more about those with less, or those affected by war or other calamities. But those problems and the philanthropic urge to do something about them are far greater than something for Dickens' Scrooge to do on Christmas morning after a night of ghostly encounters.

Globally, private philanthropy is big and growing. Nonprofit foundation Giving Tuesday alone is now a worldwide phenomenon that raised more than three billion dollars last month. The impulse to give is global.

But how to know whether your charity is impactful? Whether the money you aim for refugees or cancer research or policy advocacy hits its mark? Much of the non-profit world is opaque on the best of days.

Cue Charity Navigator, a US NGO whose purpose is to bring transparency to philanthropy. Our guest today on New Thinking For A New World is Michael Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator, which regularly examines and rates 200,000 American nonprofits, aiming to provide objective criteria to guide giving. Today, the US; tomorrow, the world.

What do you think?

Our world has become a weird combination of dangerous, existential challenges and of almost magical, potential solutions. On the one hand, we see accelerating, deadly climate change, proliferating famine, pandemics, war, and growing political and social tensions that could threaten life as we know it. On the other hand, we are witnessing amazing advances in robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, neuro-technology, life sciences and beyond that could be pathways to a more robust, resilient, and prosperous future.

Which is it going to be? Are we doomed or can we save ourselves? Can all those fabulous innovations be transformed into practical realities at the necessary speed and scale, and in ways that allow mankind to flourish?

Scott Cohen believes the answer is a resounding, “Yes!!” He co-founded New Lab, an American based initiative to bring together entrepreneurs, engineers, and inventors to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. And “solve” doesn’t mean someday: it means now. Listen as he discusses how he and his colleagues at New Lab are doing exactly that.

What do you think?

This episode was originally published on August 04, 2022.

The US mid-term elections are (almost) over. We know the headlines: Democratic Senate, Republican House, many election deniers denied election. Democrats win by not losing; Republicans prove that when bad candidates deserve to lose, they do. Perhaps most importantly—after all the sturm und drang of the last election cycle—voters voted, ballots were counted, winners celebrated and losers conceded. In other words, America had a normal election.

But is it too early to say that democracy has healed itself? Is the absence of wild allegations of fraud too low a bar for a country that likes to think of itself as the gold standard for representative democracy? What are the implications of the massive amounts of money—almost $17 billion—that candidates raised and spent during their campaigns? Does the way-too-early launch of the 2024 presidential election cycle signal that politicking, rather than governing, is what American politicians are best at?

We invited Richard Gephardt, former Democratic congressman and long-time party leader, and Scott Miller, one of America's most successful political strategists, to sift through the evidence and speculate on the future of democracy in America.

This material was originally recorded during a Tällberg webinar and has been lightly edited for this podcast.

2020 will be remembered as the Pandemic Year, when a deadly pathogen somehow moved from bat to human—and the rest is history still being written. Six out of 10 infectious diseases are zoonotic: everything from COVID and the other coronaviruses to rabies, West Nile, even the plague. In a Croesus-like effort to break the cycle, Denmark recently killed 17 million farmed mink to try to prevent further human infection—but that seems immoral as well as stupid.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka has a better idea. Dr Gladys, as she is known, believes that zoonotic disease is controllable by simultaneously working to improve the health of humans and animals, at the points where they meet. Her work, primarily with the mountain gorillas of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, has contributed not only to resurgence in the gorilla population, but also to an improvement in the health and welfare of the human communities that live around the Park.

She explains her approach in this episode of New Thinking for a New World.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a winner of the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Globbal Leadership Prize.

This episode was originally published on December 17, 2020